An instrument, not a pitch. Run them on anything you are being sold — a company you have funded, a demo you are sitting through, a vendor you already pay. Run them on us, which is why the scorecard below includes us.
Every AI product makes the same four promises. It knows your business. It works on its own. It's transformative. It isn't just a chatbot.
The single-purpose tools promise it. The assistants built into your software promise it. The dashboards promise it. The automation platforms promise it. We promise it too.
Which means the promise tells you nothing. The difference between something genuinely new and something repackaged is never visible in what a company claims. It only shows up in the answers.
So here are five questions. They take about ten minutes to ask, and you do not need to be technical to ask them or to judge the replies.
Questions 1 and 2 sort the market into its real groups. Questions 3, 4 and 5 are the ones almost nothing survives.
Five kinds of thing get sold as "AI for your business." Here is where each one actually lands when you run the five questions on it. Read across a row to judge one kind; read down a column to compare all six on the same question. The last row is ours, scored the same way.
| Category | 1 · Knows what nobody typed | 2 · Moves before it's asked | 3 · Turns red when wrong | 4 · Survives a better AI | 5 · Survives cancelling |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Single-purpose toolAI SDR, support bot, notetaker | Its own narrow slice | Fires on a trigger | Wrong looks exactly like right | They pick the AI, not you | Nothing |
| Assistant in your softwarein the doc, the email, the CRM | The file you happen to have open | It waits to be asked | No | Welded to one vendor's AI | Nothing |
| Dashboard or "AI insights"the analytics layer | Your numbers, not your work | You go and look | It describes; it doesn't judge | Nothing to carry across | A chart |
| Automation or agent platformthe orchestration layer | Only what somebody wired in | A trigger, not a judgment | It errors — that isn't noticing | Every prompt re-tuned for the new AI | Wiring that runs only inside their system |
| AI transformation consultantthe strategy engagement | What they interviewed, frozen | No — and then they leave | No | The deck. Nothing else | A deck and a pilot |
| AI Integratoran operating system, not a tool | Your goal, departments, handoffs, rules, and what each tool can really do | The first 90%, ready for a named person to approve | Work that can't be checked is refused, not shipped | Written for any AI, tuned to none | Your business, readable by any AI, in your custody |
Where we are honestly weak. It starts slow. There is a real interview, and your company has to answer honestly — including about the difference between how you say you do things and how they actually get done. A single-purpose tool installs in an afternoon; this doesn't. And the work never really finishes.
A company brain you can carry to any AI is the one feature no major platform will ever ship, because your way out is their lost customer. That isn't a claim about how clever anyone is. It's an incentive you can check for yourself.
The scorecard tells you where each kind of thing usually lands. These tell you how to read the reply in front of you.
"It knows our one goal, our departments, who hands work to whom, and the decisions we made in March — because those got written down somewhere it can read."
"It learns from your usage." "You can upload your documents." "It has a long memory." All three mean the same thing: it knows whatever somebody typed in recently.
"At 7am it put three things on a named person's list: a deal that has sat two weeks, an onboarding step stuck waiting on legal, and a campaign spending money with the tracking switched off."
"Just ask it anything." "It's always available." "There's a dashboard." A dashboard is not initiative — somebody still has to go and look at it. If your people have to remember to use it, your people are the integration, and that breaks in the first genuinely busy week.
"Before anything is sent or saved we check it against the rule for that specific record, and it stops if it breaks one. After it saves, we read it back and compare. Here is what we cannot catch, and why."
"It's very accurate." "95% success rate." "There's a human in the loop." None of those is a mechanism. Then ask the follow-up: has anyone deliberately tried to break that check? A check nobody has attacked isn't a check.
"All of it. Switching is changing a plug. The AI is handed one job at a time and never sees how the whole thing works, so swapping it changes nothing else."
"We're built on the best model available." "We'll upgrade you when the time comes." Translation: somebody spent months hand-tuning instructions for one particular AI, and that work is what gets thrown away.
"Your own record of how your company works, in your hands, in a form any AI can read — because it was never on our side to begin with."
"We can export your data." An export is a file nobody can use. Ask it straight: will you ever let me carry my company's knowledge out to a competitor's AI? Listen to how carefully the answer is worded.
If you cancelled every AI vendor you use on Monday — what would your company still know on Tuesday? If the answer is "nothing," you didn't buy AI. You rented it.
Then hold us to it. We wrote out our own answers to all twenty-one follow-up questions behind these five — including the places our honest answer is "no" or "not yet." That's here: How to Tell New AI from Me-Too AI.
The diagnostic is free, and we will tell you honestly whether this fits your company or whether one of the other paths is the better call.
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